


Their Lot

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Tamír Trilogy - Lynn Flewelling
Genre: Anger, Class Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Loyalty, Military, Missing Scene, Spoilers for book 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 19:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17628206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: After the raid, there isn’t much to say.





	Their Lot

**Author's Note:**

> In the world of the Tamír Triad and Nightrunner, the age of majority is 16, but, as in real life, teenagers become sexually active a lot earlier than that. Sometimes really early — Ki is about 12 or 13 when he starts. I don’t know Una’s actual canonical age, but for the purposes of this fic I have her at 15. Ahra is about three or four years older.

Fighting, real fighting, was a lot more interesting than court. A lot more fun, too. Until it wasn’t.

None of them said much on the way back to Rilmar. Not that they could have, with Korin there, and Alben and Mago, and Toad only too happy to tell Korin if you looked at him the wrong way. But it wasn’t like there was much to say.

To be fair, there never really was. You felt the swing of Bilairy’s gate stir the air next to you when first you got blooded, and then every time you lost a battle-mate. You didn’t talk overmuch about it — either how much you missed them, or why didn’t Sakor let you fall instead of them. At least, not when you were sober. You talked about how brave they were, how loyal, or maybe about the time they got blind-drunk in a tavern and staggered up front and took a piss in the lutist’s coffer.

Una didn’t know if she was up to talking about thirteen people like that. Maybe more than that. Nobody’d seen or found Bron since the battle had begun, and the drysians didn’t know if Samora was going to make it through the night.

Or Lutha. Sakor’s Fire, she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed Lutha.

They’d set up camp outside the keep. “Don’t want you all getting soft,” Ahra’d said. She wasn’t ashamed of her family, like Ki so obviously was; she just scorned the thought of taking shelter behind walls against freebooters, especially after having put paid to that nest of them. And she was right, it wouldn’t be good for discipline.

For Una’s part, she wouldn’t have admitted it under thumbscrews, but she thought she’d rather take her chances with brigands than sleep inside those stinking, cheerless walls.

The first thing they did when they got back to camp, after tending to the horses, was to follow the nearby icy stream eastward for a good distance, walking with the wind. Then they stripped down and waded into the icy water. Men and women together, like they always bathed, but none of the usual jokes about nipples like arrowheads or cocks and balls shrinking up into bellies. Not long after they dried off on the rough, threadbare towels Lady Sekora’s women had gathered up for them. Against the cutting wind, each of them struggled into the solitary set of spare clothes they carried.

The reeking pile of their battle garb, they left behind them. Although not the reek of them, not entirely: Herech lingered alongside the pile with flint and steel. Invisible tendrils of burning filth — shit, piss, vomit, blood, guts, rank sweat — wound their way into Una’s nostrils. She and the others threw cloak-weighted arms over their faces.

Nobody felt any more like eating than they did talking, but the body needed fuel, the heart be damned and the nose along with it. They squatted on the ground or perched themselves on rocks and gnawed joylessly at hardtack, jerky, and apples. Just enough to still the belly, washed down with only water: who knew what brigands might still be about.

Then, in that sullen silence, they laid out their bedrolls.

Ahra unstrapped hers and flung it out with an almost casual flex of her lower arms. Its thump upon the ground was Una’s cue to rise. One evening three months before, Ahra had caught her eye, something hungry and determined in her own. She’d said, “You can keep me company tonight, if you want.” Nervous, giddy, wildly curious, Una had slid into Ahra’s bedroll after nightfall and learned that hard muscles, rough hands, and beardless lips were just as enthralling on a girl as on boy.

But tonight, Ahra’s eyes were indecipherable, and she gave her head a single minute shake. Una ceased dusting her hands of crumbs and squinted. Ahra cast a brief gaze all about — nobody was paying them much mind — and jerked her head decisively west.

They walked west this time, night vision throwing the stones and roots beneath their feet into sharper focus. At length, Ahra stopped in a copse and put the sole of her boot to the bole of an old, old oak. Quickly she scaled it, reaching a thick limb a good fifteen feet above the ground and settling herself upon it. Una was already following suit. For the first time in a long time, she remembered the feel of the eaves beneath her feet outside Tobin’s balcony in Ero.

The limb barely moved under their combined weight. A web of branches and fine twigs hung about them, their leaves half gone by now. Ahra eased herself up against Una’s side, companionate, sharing warmth. She said nothing for a while. Una, bracing her calves beneath the branch, said nothing either, just listened to the woods. Some nightbirds, some insects, just a remnant now of the summer night’s chorus. Come another month, she thought, there’d be no more than the owl’s call.

Just as she’d learned to ride and fight, she’d learned to keep her eyes and ears open. So when Ahra finally said, “That whoreson,” nearly inaudible as it was, it was a clarion that lifted the fine hairs on the back of Una’s neck.

It wasn’t the profanity. For Riders, profanity was punctuation. It wasn’t the anger, either, because Una was no less angry. But she’d never heard Ahra speak so bitterly before. And to disparage the lineage of a prince was treason. Una suppressed the impulse to look about the copse for the sight of Moriel slipping behind a tree.

She said nothing. There was nothing more to say now than there’d been on the ride back. Apropos of nothing, she thought of court again. So many fine and gilded words, and so few of them worth a drop of spit. But there, too, silences portended volumes. Court was another battlefield, she thought, if a far less honest one. Better the sword at your throat than the dagger in your back.

At length Ahra spoke again, no less soft and even more bitter. “‘Well, that’s their lot, isn’t it?’ Bilairy’s balls.” She leaned away from Una and spat into the duff below. “Thirteen of us, Una. _Thirteen._ Maybe more’n that too by morning. All so that strutting capon could get them smears on his face he ain’t even earned.”

Una took Ahra’s hand in hers. Horn-hard, scaly, nails worn to the quick. In this light she couldn’t see the dark streaks beneath them, blood and grime worked deep, that river water never touched. Her own hands were much the same now. Killers’ hands, protectors’ hands. The hands of dead men and women. She squeezed the hard mass of Ahra’s hand and ran the rough pads of her own fingertips over the back of it.

After a long, long while, Ahra squeezed back, and Una could hear the breath exit her nostrils in a rush.

It was another long while before she felt a bit of tension leave the hand in her grasp, and heard Ahra chuckle. “Prince Tobin, though. Sakor-touched, he is, just like my father said. I owe him for today.” Another squeeze. “And for you.”

Warmth bloomed in Una’s face, and in her breast. She didn’t blush the way she used to anymore. But she didn’t prize most men’s words and looks the way she used to, either. Ahra’s words were another thing altogether, earned in blood. And in joy.

Only a minute or two passed this time before Ahra said, “I should go find him while everyone else is asleep. Tell him what happened. Least I can do. And thank him.”

It was Una’s turn to sigh more softly than the leaves in the wind. Unwilling to let go of Ahra’s hand to grasp the tree limb, she curled her legs tighter about it, then reached into the neck of her tunic with her other hand. The golden sword pendant was warm against her palm. Her desire for Tobin had banked to embers, but he would ever have her regard and, aye, her love. Her debt to him was no less than Ahra’s; in her reckoning, it was greater. She’d no idea how it might come about, but, Sakor willing, someday she’d offer him Grandmother’s sword in return.

Ahra slapped Una’s nearer thigh lightly. The sound was startling in the quiet. “Let’s go. I’m off to the keep. You get some rest.”

"Captain,” Una said drily. It earned her a flash of gold in the dark, amid teeth that were darkened or not there at all. Then they launched themselves into the air, rustling the duff as they landed on their feet in it, and in a moment they were nothing but two shadows drifting silently toward the stars in the eastern sky.


End file.
